Here and There, Mar. 26

A very Happy Birthday to my Aunt Lynne

A nail in the coffin of bilingual education?: Five years after voters approved English-only classrooms across California, the popular ballot measure seems to be working. The percentage of English-learning students who tested as proficient in English nearly tripled from 11% in 2001 to 32% in 2002. English-only learners score higher on the test than do bilingual students.

The San Francisco Chronicle seems to be paying its in-house "war blogger" to spin the news for Saddam.

All Jazeera, All the Time: My single biggest source of blog traffic today is people doing search engine queries for "Al Jazeera". (The search engines are pointing to a translation of a news story from the Al Jazeera web site I posted last year). The Al Jazeera web site itself is currently unreachable (by me, at least). Earlier this week it was suffering from what appeared to be traffic overload, amid reports speculating that it had been hacked and/or a victim of a "denial of service" attack. Pages were loading slowly, and often timing out, but it was definitely functioning. At this moment, however, the site is unreachable (for the techies in the audience -- Al Jazeera's DNS servers will not resolve the hostname www.aljazeera.net into an IP address). The earlier speculation was that the hacking attempts came from the US, so does this mean that the site is blocked to US traffic, or is it down altogether? Can any of my overseas readers tell me whether they can reach the Al Jazeera website?

UPDATE As of 9pm PST www.aljazeera.net is back online. The much vaunted English language website, english.aljazeera.net only points to the Arabic site.

Meanwhile in Iran The Mullahcrats are organizing an "anti-war" rally for Friday, in support of their old (friend? enemy? I give up) Saddam. The pro-democracy civil disobedience movement is boycotting the pro-tyranny "anti-war" rally.

Veteran Ha'aretz reporter Ze'ev Schiff, always worth reading, says "the Turks bear much of the responsibility for the gap that has developed between the timetable of the original battle plan and what has actually happened in the field."

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at March 26, 2003 03:58 PM